Its westernmost tip at the Cumberland Gap is a seven-hour drive from McLean-and it reaches farther west than Detroit.Īside from the taxes it pays, Northern Virginia is arguably part of the state in name only. With 7.7 million people, it’s the 12th-largest state. But the idea has lots of appeal.įor starters, Virginia is too damn big. No one has filed legislation to partition the state-politically, that would be nearly impossible. But in the years since, Northern Virginia officials fed up with Richmond have talked often of rebellion. Pennino, who died in 2004, was only half serious when she issued her call for independence in the 1970s. “Madam chairman,” she announced at a Board of Supervisors meeting, “I’d like to suggest that we secede from Virginia and become the 51st state.” “I’m not trying to be ornery,” he added, “but somebody down here has to put the brakes on.”Īfter more than a few such trips, Pennino’s frustration boiled over. “It just bothers me,” he said, “that you’re always coming up with something special up there, and what we’ve already got isn’t good enough. Northern Virginia, he told her, had to learn its place. Willey didn’t see much to like in Pennino’s plan to make Reston the state’s first “chartered community,” with its own elected officials and the power to levy taxes. On one occasion she testified before a committee headed by 69-year-old Edward Willey Sr., the irascible Senate majority leader and elder statesman of the state’s conservative Democrats. She frequently went to Richmond to advocate for the region only to meet opposition from downstate lawmakers, some of whom sneered at what they called the “people’s republic of Northern Virginia.” A tiny woman made larger than life by her blond beehive and sunny disposition, Pennino charmed everyone.Įveryone, that is, except state legislators. For the next quarter of a century, she played midwife to Fairfax’s emergence as a booming metropolis, helping to give birth to such regional anchors as George Mason University, the Dulles Toll Road, and the town of Reston.īy the time Pennino left office in 1991, she was known as Mother Fairfax. Pennino plunged into politics and in 1967 won election to the Fairfax Board of Supervisors. Farmland covered much of Fairfax County, which was home to about 100,000 people and enough cows to make it one of the state’s largest dairy producers.

Martha Pennino moved to Vienna in 1956 when her husband, Walter, a decorated Army veteran of World War II and Korea, took a Pentagon job.

Beehive hat civil war